The Marriage Clause : A Fake Engagement, Forbidden Desire Contemporary Romance, livre ebook

Natalie Hart was twelve the last time she let herself need somebody. She stood in the gravel drive counting *one Mississippi, two Mississippi* until her father's tail lights bent around the curve past the old maple, then went upstairs, opened a notebook and wrote in careful, deliberate letters: *I will never need anyone that much again.*
Now she unlocks the front door of Hartwell Events with a brass key warm from her palm, and a scale model of the Hartwell Estate sits dead centre on the conference table. She spent four hours on the placement alone, every dormer exact to the original blueprints she found in the town archives.
She needs this contract. Her sister Sophie has a tremor in her hands, a new infusion schedule that might work, and insurance that will cap out. Her aunt holds fifty-one percent of the business Natalie built and cannot control, and talks in every conversation about selling up for a veranda in the south of France.
Eighteen minutes before the board meeting, the chairwoman slides a folder across the table. A supplementary report, from the architect assigned to the project. Natalie has never met him. He has already been down into the estate basement without her.
Lucas Brennan is quiet, precise and entirely unmoved by her fury. The basement was renovated in 1974 without permits. The replacement beam is under-rated. What he recommends is a complete foundation overhaul: dig out the basement, pour new footings, replace the compromised beams. When she protests that the structural engineer signed off, he answers that the engineer signed off on the plans she provided and never inspected the basement. *I did. Yesterday.*
What follows is a working partnership between a woman who has organised her entire life around needing no one, and an architect carrying a clause in his own partnership agreement, one that triggers if he is romantically involved with a client while under contract and costs him the Hartwell project and every future contract pledged against it.
He is also, quietly, still carrying a woman who was engaged to him for eight months before she took a partnership in Boston, and a habit of rubbing his thumb against his fingers when he is about to say something difficult.
A contemporary small-town romance on the Maine coast, about a failing estate, a family trust, a cousin with a lawsuit, and two careful people working out what they are prepared to risk. The romance is closed-door.